NEW YORK — Goaltending battles between the Devils' Martin Brodeur and Rangers' Henrik Lundqvist will be remembered as some of the greatest in history, comparable perhaps to an era in baseball when Roger Clemens periodically faced Pedro Martinez in their primes.

Except these guys do it in masks and pads.

“They’re fun. He’s a guy that people put on a pedestal, with reason,” Brodeur said of Lundqvist tonight. “He’s a popular guy in a popular city where hockey is really important and he’s playing really well.

“Regardless of where he is in his career I think right now they’re putting him up there with the top goalies. For him, it’s going to be important to keep it up. For me, it’s a nice matchup to play against the top goalie in the league.”

It was Brodeur who pitched a shutout in their last showdown back on Feb. 7. Not surprisingly, Lundqvist answered tonight with a 2-0 victory over the Devils at Madison Square Garden.

He needed to make only 13 saves (Brodeur had the same total), but Lundqvist now has a league-leading eight shutouts this season and 43 in his career. And the victory extended his personal streak to seven straight seasons with 30 wins.

“I remember my first year. It was a big deal to reach 30 wins and now it’s the seventh straight year to reach it,” Lundqvist said.

“Obviously it means a lot to me. It means that things have been going well, but it also means I play for a club that’s given me the opportunity to play a lot. I have a pretty good team in front of me, as well.”

Indeed, the Rangers moved nine points ahead of the idle Bruins in the Eastern Conference standings. They are 12 points ahead of the Devils, who have lost three in a row.”

“No concern at all,” Devils captain Zach Parise said. “If we played terrible three games in a row it would be.”

Lundqvist made a key glove save on Ilya Kovalchuk’s slapper with 2:26 left. He got a break when Adam Henrique missed the net from in front minutes earlier.

But, aside from a Parise redirection of a Mark Fayne shot late in the second, the Devils didn’t generate much offense.

“It was tight checking. You could tell by the shots,” Parise noted. “There was not a lot of room, not a lot of space. Everyone was finishing checks. It was a hard game.

“Every season it seems like there are these type of games with these guys. We had one earlier this year. You have to come in prepared to play that type of game, which I thought we were.”

All Lundqvist needed was Carl Hagelin’s goal at 16:59 of the opening period. The second didn’t come until Brodeur was pulled for an extra skater and Ryan Callahan scored into the empty net with 1:06 to go.

“There’s not much room for mistakes out there,” Brodeur said. “I think the way both teams played it was kind of a chess match a little bit. Probably a little boring for people to watch, but for us it was really interesting to go out and play a game like that. I thought we played pretty hard and pretty well, but we just couldn’t get through a line of three goalies in front of Lundqvist.

“You have to be almost perfect to play these kind of games. This is what the playoffs are going to be all about.”

Brodeur versus Lundqvist is a classic matchup, although the statistics show the Rangers goalie with a 22-6-5 career record against the winningest goalie in NHL history.

And his 24-10-5 record with six career shutouts against the Devils isn’t bad, either.